Dear Elon Musk... Please send me to Mars. The rewards would be worth the risk of death

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Life on Mars would hold attractions that would far compensate the risks of being exiled from Earth

Dear Elon Musk,

I hope you don’t mind me contacting you out of the blue. I read that you’re looking for people willing to endure significant risk of death in order to establish a Mars colony as species-wide insurance against a third world war. “There’s not many people who will want to go in the beginning,” you told a conference in Texas this week.

Being from the UK, where certain events involving a lethal nerve agent and a car park ticket machine have prompted me to consider the prospect of global cataclysm more seriously than usual, I would like, as humbly as I can, to offer myself.

Why would I say such a thing? It’s not that I’m tired of life on Earth. I would dearly miss its waterfalls and...